Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1436094
son has some artistic talent, it is likely there will be a lot of strictly parallel lines bunched together and creating crosstalk. It may look nice, but it won't function properly. But a designer who has the knowledge and experience, plus a little bit of OCD, will also want to have the lines run- ning nice and straight with adequate clearances to avoid signal integrity problems. It's a matter of efficiency. If I fulfill the design rules of a layout and it simulates properly, using efficient meandering as necessary, and using traces as short as possible to make rout- ing less than the critical length, that is good. It can look artistic and will be easy to edit in the future. Shaughnessy: It sounds like an artistic eye is a requirement for this job? Olney: Yes. You must be symmetrical as well. I do everything symmetrically. I hate things that are out of balance. at's true with a PCB stackup from top layer to bottom layer. All the planes must be symmetrical about the center, and the way you route things, you choose strip line combinations that are symmetrical about the center. It's an artistic talent, but there's also attention to detail and you must be a perfec- tionist. If I see a little kink in a trace, I'll fix it. I won't just leave and say, "Oh, that'll be all right." I can't leave it; it just annoys me. You must be a real perfectionist to design a board properly and you need to have the capacity to accept change because a board designer is in a con- stant state of flux. You're given a schematic, and you start placing and routing it. en someone comes along and says, "Okay, here are some more changes. Add these five chips to the board." Now you must move everything around. You anticipate changes until the end of the design, so another ability you must pos- sess is to deliver on time and under constant pressure. e board layout is the last process in the design cycle. For example, with Christ- mas coming up, there's always this mad rush